How to report errors in a procedural macro using the quote macro?

I am writing a procedural macro which works fine, but I am having trouble reporting errors in an ergonomic way. Using panic! "works" but is not elegant and does not present the error message to the user nicely.

I know that I can report good errors while parsing a TokenStream, but I need to produce errors while traversing the AST after it has been parsed.

The macro invocation looks like this:

attr_test! {
    #[bool]
    FOO
}

And should output:

const FOO: bool = false;

This is the macro code:

extern crate proc_macro;
use quote::quote;
use syn::parse::{Parse, ParseStream, Result};
use syn::{Attribute, parse_macro_input, Ident, Meta};

struct AttrTest {
    attributes: Vec<Attribute>,
    name: Ident,
}

impl Parse for AttrTest {
    fn parse(input: ParseStream) -> Result<Self> {
        Ok(AttrTest {
            attributes: input.call(Attribute::parse_outer)?,
            name: input.parse()?,
        })
    }
}

#[proc_macro]
pub fn attr_test(tokens: proc_macro::TokenStream) -> proc_macro::TokenStream {
    let test: AttrTest = parse_macro_input!(tokens);
    let name = test.name;
    let first_att = test.attributes
        .get(0)
        .and_then(|att| att.parse_meta().ok());
    if let Some(Meta::Word(ty)) = first_att {
        if ty.to_string() != "bool" {
            panic!("expected bool");
        }
        let output = quote! {
            const #name: #ty = false;
        };
        output.into()
    } else {
        panic!("malformed or missing metadata")
    }
}

I would like to produce an error if anything other than bool is specified in the attribute. For example, input like this:

attr_test! {
    #[something_else]
    FOO
}

should result in something like:

error: expected bool
attr_test! {
    #[something_else]
      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ expected bool
    FOO
}

During parsing, there is a Result, which has lots of useful information including a span, so the resulting errors can highlight the exact parts of the macro call that have a problem. But once I'm traversing the AST, I can't see a good way to report errors.

How should this be done?

Apart from panicking, there are currently two ways to reports errors from a proc-macro: the unstable Diagnostic API and "the compile_error! trick". Currently, the latter is mostly used because it works on stable. Let's see how they both work.

The compile_error! trick

Since Rust 1.20, the compile_error! macro exists in the standard library. It takes a string and leads to an error at compile time.

compile_error!("oopsie woopsie");

Which leads to (Playground):

error: oopsie woopsie
 --> src/lib.rs:1:1
  |
1 | compile_error!("oopsie woopsie");
  | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This macro has been added for two cases: macro_rules! macros and #[cfg]. In both cases, library authors can add better errors if the user uses the macro incorrectly or has the wrong cfg values.

But proc-macro programmers had an interesting idea. As you might know, the TokenStream you return from your procedural macro can be created however you like. That includes the spans of those tokens: you can attach any spans you like to your output tokens. So the main idea is this:

Emit a tokenstream containing compile_error!("your error message"); but set the span of those tokens to the span of the input token that caused the error. There is even a macro in quote which makes this easier: quote_spanned!. In your case, we can write this:

let output = if ty.to_string() != "bool" {
    quote_spanned! {
        ty.span() =>
        compile_error!("expected bool");
    }
} else {
    quote! {
        const #name: #ty = false;
    }
};

For your faulty input, the compiler now prints this:

error: expected bool
 --> examples/main.rs:4:7
  |
4 |     #[something_else]
  |       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Why exactly does this work? Well: the error for compile_error! shows the code snippet containing the compile_error! invocation. For that, the span of the compile_error! invocation is used. But since we set the span to point to the faulty input token ty, the compiler shows the snippet underlining that token.

This trick is also used by syn to print nice errors. In fact, if you are using syn anyway, you can use its Error type and in particular the Error::to_compile_error method which returns exactly the token stream we manually created with quote_spanned!:

syn::Error::new(ty.span(), "expected bool").to_compile_error()

---

The Diagnostic API

As this is still unstable, just a short example. The diagnostic API is more powerful than the trick above as you can have multiple spans, warnings and notes.

Diagnostic::spanned(ty.span().unwrap(), Level::Error, "expected bool").emit();

After that line, the error is printed, but you can still do stuff in your proc-macro. Usually, you would just return an empty token stream.